The Illiterati (was Re: Social Hacking [was:

Fri Jan 30 13:18:36 PST 2004

Three cheers to Nadine. This was very well put. 

When I first moving up of the ranks, I was told when making presentations that each slide had to have less words as the salary of the audiance went higher. Why? Because they have more issues than what I was working on and the expectation of their people was to either make the right recommendation, resolve the problem, or present options to executive level issues. If you couldn't summarize then you were perceived to not be the top in your position by lack of confidence or technical ability and your exit interview was closer than previously thought. As I became a manager and spent less time with my own group and more with other orginizations in the company, I had to rely on my staff to do their job and give me confidence through distinct status of proejcts and issues. If they had a problem and needed direction, it should have been requested before the status meeting. If they start rambling, I presume they have gone the "rat hole"; to me this describes a more narrow and maze like picture.

Now to present a story that Nadine wanted....

I work for companies that use co-location and hosted services. It is amazing to me that supposely educated IT people do not lock their workstations when they leave their desk. One of my directs was really sloppy about this. One day when I knew he had left for lunch a good 15 minutes before, I went by to drop off a note. His workstation was not locked and his e-mail wide open. The company uses a co-lo service that will take an e-mail as the sole authentication for a security request. So I sent an e-mail requesting that the primary contact be changed from the staff member and that he be removed from the access list; which basically was the website showing bandwidth usage. The request was accepted and executed. Now this was a "success" of social engineered hacking on two accounts. When the staff member returned from lunch, he went merrily along the day. The next morning he went to get the bandwidth usage reports from the previous day, he found out through calling the vendor that he no longer had access. Coming to me with an angry disposition asking why, I told him he was probation from any secured information for a week. For that time he was not able to do his job, instead he did desktop support and read alot. He did learn the lesson and started to lock his workstation every time he left his chair. He also started questioning the co-lo vendor about their security.

Ron Leedy 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: vraptor at employees.org [mailto:vraptor at employees.org]
> Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 07:18 PM
> To: 'richard childers / kg6hac'
> Cc: baylisa at baylisa.org
> Subject: Re: The Illiterati (was Re: Social Hacking [was: "Strong Scripting Skills" - a definition?])
> 
> On Fri, 30 Jan 2004, richard childers / kg6hac wrote:
> > vraptor at employees.org wrote:
> >
> >>... I'd like to hear some more geek social/cultural hacking stories and
> >>techniques, be they engineering your self-presentation, sussing out
> >>the true inquiries underlying the interviewer's questions, or better
> The "rabbit hole" tactic, while useful in some circumstances,
> undermines us when dealing with management, because it's contrary to
> their expectations.

(Tons of stuff removed)
> Regards--
> 
> =Nadine=
> 
> --
> N. Nadine Miller
> vraptor at employees.org
> 
> 
> p.s. As for your conspiracy comments, I do believe that America is
> suffering from a general "dumbing down" as a result of changes in
> education over the past several decades. But, that's a political
> discussion that is not on-topic for this list.
> 
> 